Ryan Caldwell over at Performancing writes about finding success with alternatives to Google’s services - particularly alternatives to Adsense.

There’s something big happening on the neterwebs. Don’t know if you’ve noticed.

For whatever reason, Google has been taking a serious gut check. Lately, they’ve been cracking down hard on AdSense publishers from a number of angles (spammyness, mature content, etc).

Well, not “for whatever reason” - I’m sure its because they’re feeling pressure from some corner of the woods. I’m sure they feel dollars and cents and shareholders breathing down their necks.

Ryan touches on some of the alternatives like “AdBrite, AuctionAds, ContextLinks, Azoogle and more” but he doesn’t tackle ranking them in this post. He only mentions that his revenues have increased since the switch from Adsense clearly indicating to him that Adsense was underperforming.

If you’re interested in reading about real world results with other alternatives keep an eye on the reports from tjantunen.com. I’m sure there are other more in depth analysis’ out there but his real world numbers are intriguing to me.

Ryan continues writing about the growing anti-Google sentiment.

I’m sure they notice things like the recent Real Simple article my wife showed me entitled “the digital doc” which outlines 5 rules to find good medical information online. What was Rule No. 1? Skip Google.

Ouch. I bet that hurt. The “don’t do evil” company let status quo evil reign for too long, while money poured into their bank accounts, and their search results got all facked up with spam. Now even the common person doubts Google. That’s sad.

There’s More! Read the full post here: Liberating Yourself From The Google Monopoly - The Times, They Are A Changin’

“The Found Agency”, an Australian firm specializing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) seems to have been penalized by Google for using black hat or at lest slightly-dark ‘grey hat‘ optimization techniques.

Wikipedia doesn’t seem to mention how those terms apply to the SEO world (which is odd, considering the relevance of that topic today). If your not familiar with “white hat” or “black hat” SEO you basically just need to understand that it’s tantamount to cheating in order to increase your natural search position. Each search engine defines it’s own terms of acceptable use but by and large they are the same - and by same I mean there is much room for interpretation.

According to an Australian news site…

Google Australia would not comment on the case — talk of which had spread like wildfire through the search marketing industry — but a spokesman pointed to its webmaster quality guidelines, which covered the most common forms of deceptive behaviour. Found Agency co-founder Tim Macdonald said Google had downgraded the site’s search ranking but refused to comment on whether the company used black hat techniques. He said some strategies the company used were “in the grey area”.

The company of course is going to great lengths to emphasize the fact that they were penalized by Google and not blacklisted. I find if very interesting that Yahoo doesn’t appear to have done anything to The Found Agency’s rankings…

So what’s the bottom line? Well it appears that The Found Agency has dropped in natural search position for “search engine optimisation” from a #1 or #2 ranking to somewhere near #40. What impact will this have on their business? Well the long term affect can be mitigated of course and in the short term heavy Australian media coverage is only going to increase sales.

Interesting Note:

Similar action does not appear to have been taken on Yahoo, which had about 14,000 links pointing to foundagency.com.au on Wednesday.

Read the original article here: Google penalises ‘black hat’ tactics